IN THE REVIEW

Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War

by Philip F. Gura

Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism

by Chris Jennings

On a sunny August afternoon in 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, after a picnic in the Berkshires and a leisurely smoke under the trees, decided, seemingly on impulse, to visit the Hancock Shaker Village, on the outskirts of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. For Melville, who lived nearby, it was a chance …

Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them

edited by Cristanne Miller

A Quiet Passion

a film directed by Terence Davies

“There are paths trodden to the shrines of solitude the world over,” Sarah Orne Jewett wrote in The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), “—the world cannot forget them, try as it may; the feet of the young find them out because of curiosity and dim foreboding; while the old …

Avid Reader

by Robert Gottlieb

There is a special allure in learning the secrets of people who work behind the scenes, especially when their success—as diplomats, psychoanalysts, or spies—depends in large part on the invisibility of what they do. This is certainly true of book editors. The illusion they seek to promote is that the …

NYR DAILY

Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger found themselves, at pivotal moments in their careers, turning to the arresting work of the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887–1914). Not surprisingly, Wittgenstein and Heidegger responded to Trakl’s striking and still mysterious poems in sharply divergent—one might almost say opposite—ways.

There is a larger cultural dimension to much of what we see in Florine Stettheimer’s paintings at the Jewish Museum: the skyscrapers, the department stores, the African-American jazz, the shifting gender roles. Viewers in search of the perfect counterpoint to the Stettheimer retrospective need only walk a block south to the razzle-dazzle show “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.”

Mark Rudman offered to push me around the Albert Pinkham Ryder exhibition in a wheelchair. This turned out to be a very good way to view art. The whole habitual rigmarole of wandering through an art museum is eliminated. The art is simply, emphatically, there, to be looked at, attentively. Everyone should see art in a wheelchair.